Kominicki: Shuffle another billion off to Buffalo

Gov. Andrew Cuomo spent a modest 272 words of his state of the state speech on Buffalo, but talk isn’t always cheap. If he follows through on his pledge to pump $1 billion into the city’s slumping economy, each word cost us roughly $3.7 million.

Not that the Bison City doesn’t need our help. Though still New York’s second-largest city, Buffalo was 15th in the country in 1950, when its manufacturing base began to wane and the population dwindled, ultimately by half. It’s now 70th.

Today, almost one-third of its 260,000 residents live in poverty, making it the third-poorest big city in America, behind Detroit and Cleveland.

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Buffalo’s median household income is less than $28,000; on Long Island, it’s almost $86,000.

The governor believes the $1 billion in state money will attract another $5 billion in private investment, transforming Buffalo in much the same way Albany has become the nabob of nanotechnology.

And Buffalo says it’s ready, with a burgeoning health care sector, recently lowered tax rates and more than 350 shovel-ready sites that would verily sprout new business the moment the check’s in the mail.

New York being New York, the governor’s largesse hasn’t proven quite so palatable to other parts of the state. In neighboring Rochester, community leaders quickly carped that they were being left out in the cold, while the local papers debated exactly what it is that former mayor Bob Duffy, now lieutenant governor, has been doing for the home team lately.

Officials in Niagara Falls took another tack, posturing publicly that the money was really a regional investment that should be shared. That drew a quick harrumph from Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who said the governor had assured him that a billion for Buffalo meant a billion for Buffalo.

The smart money, of course, worries less about where you spend $1 billion than where you get it. Much of the promised aid repackages existing state tax breaks, capital aid, matching federal grants and other resources, so giving $1 billion to Buffalo will almost certainly entail taking $1 billion from somebody else.

History, and a new study by the Rockefeller Institute, suggests the downstate suburban counties – Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Putnam – will be that somebody.

Released last month, “Giving and Getting: Regional Distribution of Revenue and Spending in the New York State Budget” attempts to track the way the state spends the more than $75 billion collected each year from New York residents and businesses and another $5 billion from people who only happen to work here.

Included are taxes on personal income, business sales and corporate profits, university tuition and hospital payments, even driver’s license fees and air-emission permits. Bolstered by billions more in federal aid, the money is distributed around the state to pay for education, health care, transportation, public safety and, um, saving places like Buffalo.

Long Islanders have longed complained they give Albany far more than they get, and the study confirms their darkest fears. In 2010, for example, the downstate suburbs paid in almost $8 billion more than came back, while the upstate and capital regions posted a $12 billion gain. New York City, long derided by Upstaters as a money-grubbing welfare experiment, was also a net loser in 2010, although it more than made up for it in federal funding.

Interesting side fact but not so surprising to those of us who’ve been there when the Legislature is in session: Based on population, the capital region pays much more in alcohol taxes than the rest of us.

The Rockefeller study careful sidesteps the question of fair share, noting simply that the current system of collections is based on a region’s ability to pay, while state expenditures are determined by shifting need and political expediency, as illustrated by the governor’s sudden interest in Buffalo.

New York City, though a significant payer, rarely ponies up as much as the suburbs because of its exalted position as financial and cultural center, terrorist target, Big Apple and All Around Straw That Stirs the Drink.

That leaves the affluent downstate suburbs to make up the difference, meaning we will always pay more and only occasionally get a fair share of it back when need and political expediency are in alignment. That, friends, is simply the way it is.

Conversely, we could be broke, half-populated and closer to a Great Lake than the Great White Way.

3 comments

Buffalo and the City of Niagara urgently need help. Both were once great cities and places to visit. They are rich in history too. Having traveled there often while at the New York Power Authority, it was heartbreaking to drive around both and see economic hardship first hand. Both mayors, Brown of Buffalo and Dyster of Niagara, are energentic advocates for their respective cities. Somehow, they need to get a greater share of the benefits of NYPA-generated hydropower. That was something Richie Kessel was seeking to achieve. It’s an idea that needs to be revisited.